Extended Essays 2021

in reverse order ’. Mitchell’s use of temporal distortion was inspire d by Calvino’s but was

achieved differently. Fu rthermore, Mitchell expressed that Adam Ewing’s 39 mid-nineteenth-

century language was taken from Moby-Dick and Zachary’s 40 broken English taken from

Ridley Walker .

Using pastiche helps greatly when establishing the concept of an unreliable narrator. As Booth

defined, a narrator can be called reliable if he acts within the ‘ norms ’ of the work’ 41 . With

pastiche, the pre-postmodern historical ‘norms’ are challenged, as pastiche has its own ‘norms’.

The concept of combining elements, genres, or stories creates large distinctions between each

meta-narrative. Mitchell’s particular emphasis on pastiche in Cloud Atlas make the ‘norms’ of

the work hard to identify and makes sure that the narrator cannot act within them. This displays

to readers that each narrator has a different genre, structure, and style within their own chapter,

making them inconsistent and unreliable. Without consistency in the way the story is told,

readers struggle to immerse themselves in the fictional world that a traditional omniscient

narrator would share on behalf of a historical-centred author, further establishing the concept

of an unreliable narrator in postmodern literature.

39 Cloud Atlas – Chapter 1 – The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing 40 Cloud Atlas – Chapter 6 – Sloo sha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After 41 The Rhetoric of Fiction. Wayne C. Booth, 1961

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